Trenton City Council discusses trimming mayor's budget

TRENTON -- City Council on Tuesday evening held budget meetings without Tony Mack in attendance.

The Office of the Mayor was discussed, but Mack didn’t show up. Instead, Trenton Business Administrator Sam Hutchinson discussed the $293,573 fiscal year 2013 budget proposal for the mayor’s office.

In that budget meeting, council talked about the Mack administration’s proposal to earmark $50,000 for the annual salary of mayoral aide Carmen Melendez, who, sources said, has testified three times to the federal grand jury that could soon indict Mack on federal corruption charges.

Melendez is currently taking an unpaid leave of absence indefinitely.

“For someone to take an unpaid leave of absence indefinitely, I think that is a problem,” West Ward Councilman Zachary Chester said at the budget meeting.

“We know precisely what the circumstances are here,” Hutchinson said. “We’re pretty comfortable where we are.”

Melendez was the former acting director of Trenton’s Department of Housing and Economic Development. During the FBI’s two-year-long investigation on Mack, Melendez was secretly recorded by FBI cooperating witnesses as the FBI advanced its sting.

The FBI complaint alleges Mack was supposed to get $50,000 for his alleged role in offering to sell a $278,000 city-owned lot for $100,000. Melendez isn’t mentioned in the complaint by name, but sources said she’s the Trenton official who suggested the purchasing price of the city-owned lot should have been equivalent to the lot’s market value.